Ashish Kumar Chauhan, MD & CEO of the National Stock Exchange (NSE), has said that the India-UK trade deal should become a template for India’s other trade deals with like-minded countries. He termed the deal a harbinger of things to come under new geopolitical realities, where multilateralism is gradually moving away.

“This is the first deal post Brexit, what I call the gradual moving away from multilateralism; that, in a way, (US President) Donald Trump kickstarted. So, India-UK Free Trade Agreement should become a template for India’s deals with other important like-minded countries like the US, the EU or Japan,” Chauhan told ANI.

The India-UK Free Trade Agreement was signed and formalised on Thursday during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the UK.

“We already have an FTA with Australia. But this is coming post the new Labour Government took over and this deal actually was negotiated initially with the Conservative Government and then last year, when the Labour Government came into play, many people thought this may not be working out. But post-Donald Trump inauguration in January, I think things have changed very suddenly. The changes have accelerated,” the MD & CEO of NSE said.